Cognitive abilities, or cognitive skills, are brain-based skills that the brain remembers, thinks, reads, learns, reasons, holds the attention and solves problems. They are the core skills that your brain uses to carry out tasks, ranging from simple to complex. These attributes help your brain to process new information by taking that information and distributing it into the appropriate areas in your brain.
How do Cognitive Skills help?
When all of these skills come to work together, they take in the information and move it into the bank of knowledge you use every day at school, at work, and in life. When you need particular information later, the brain uses the aforesaid cognitive skills to retrieve and use it. By developing these skills, you help your brain to complete this process more efficiently and quickly to ensure that you understand and effectively process the new information.
How many Cognitive Skills do We Have?
It is helpful to know that there are eight cognitive skills. Nurturing these skills early in life can reward children well into adulthood. Stronger cognitive abilities help to increase emotional intelligence, social skills, and problem-solving. The 8 core cognitive abilities are:
- Sustained Attention – It enables you to stay focused on your tasks despite distractions whereas attention enables you to remember information while multitasking.
- Response Inhibition – It refers to the suppression of actions that are considered inappropriate in a given context and that interfere with goal-driven behavior.
- Speed of Information Processing – It helps you to quickly and accurately perform tasks. It improves your productivity by helping you efficiently and effectively complete tasks.
- Cognitive Flexibility – This skill helps you to quickly adapt to new situations and increase brain function and resilience to stress. It helps to improve fluency and comprehension while reading and achieve an expanded sense of awareness.
- Multiple Simultaneous Attention – Multitasking is another great skill that lets you do two or more things at once error-free. Weak multitasking ability results in confusion, chaos, and the inability to complete one or both tasks.
- Working Memory – This skill enables you to hold on to information while in the process of using it and also recall information stored in the past.
- Category Formation – It is the ability to organize information, concepts, and skills into categories. It forms the cognitive basis for higher-level abilities like applying, analyzing, and evaluating those concepts and skills. This skill is the basis of language and the organization of the world.
- Pattern Recognition – It is one of the special abilities of the human brain to not only find patterns but figure out a logical way too on what those patterns suggest about what will happen next. The inductive thinking form the basis for all scientific inquiry.
What are cognitive thinking skills?
With the above explained eight cognitive skills, you can put your child into action. Cognitive thinking abilities and skills include:
- abstract thinking
- attention
- critical thinking
- decision making
- focus
- language
- logic and reasoning
- memory
- motor skills
- perception
- problem-solving
These skills can be learned and practiced daily anytime, whether your child is attending a virtual class while learning in school, or even while playing with friends. Each of the core cognitive capacities plays an important part in processing new information. It means that if even one of these skills is weak, no matter what kind of information comes your way, grasping, retaining, or using that information gets impacted. In fact, most learning struggles are caused by one or more weak cognitive skills.
Conclusion
The SOI approach to developing and improving cognitive skills is unique and highly effective. At iamoneTruTH, children and adults both can reap benefits from Arizona’s best cognitive development program. The central vision of the organization is to seek the overall development of the candidate. Visit SOI Systems to know more.
